Tank No. 1
Tina Modotti Italian
Not on view
Filling Tina Modotti’s frame, the curved wall of an oil tank flattens into a graphic field. Modotti intended this photograph to illustrate a volume of proletarian poetry by Germán List Arzubide, a fellow activist in the leftmost circles of Mexico City’s art scene. Though the project was never published, the photograph’s composition, with its prominent typography, conjures an unrealized book cover. Less interested in industrial forms than in the people who operated them, Modotti attends to the symbolic ascent of a laborer across the tank’s vast surface.
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